


Gödel Fics for Fun and Profit

by primeideal



Category: Original Work
Genre: Extra Treat, Gödel Tag: Do Not Include This, Mathematics, The Author Regrets Everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 08:49:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20273209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: "you're studying logic what will you ever do with that in the real world""IDK write a bunch of awesome fanfic, I guess"





	Gödel Fics for Fun and Profit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ruis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruis/gifts).

> I have no excuses and no explanation for this.

Anyway for those of you wondering how you can use the magic of Gödel nonsense to write fics that undermine their own premise, here’s a brief FYI! (Feel free to do this on Ao3, btw, you can’t break their systems any worse. Shrug.)

If you’re wanting to write a fic you need some _characters_, of course. Unfortunately there are a whole lot of characters in the fictional universes and multiverses so we might not have good canonical names for them all. Ao3 tries to help with synning aliasses for the same name together with | but this can be pretty annoying.

Fortunately, there’s a janky workaround. As We All Know, Voldemort put a curse on the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts so that nobody could have it for more than a year. So Quirrell had it in Harry Potter’s first year, then Lockhart, and so on. (In some interviews J. K. Rowling has said that this curse went away after Voldemort died, but barring a situation like Binns, people probably aren’t going to have the job indefinitely. And some people ignore secondary canon anyway! So I’m just going to assume that there are an infinite number of dark arts professors, from Quirrell on to infinity.)

Now, instead of writing L for Lupin or L for Lockhart (which could potentially be confusing, especially if you’re on FFN and abbreviating people’s names to fit in summaries), we can instead say SSQ, for “the guy who had the job two years after Quirrell” or SQ, for “the guy who had the job the year after Quirrell. Much clearer. It also avoids spoilers for the Moody/Barty Crouch Jr. identity reveal, that guy is just SSSQ.

Along with characters, you might also need _epithets_. Many writers have been criticized for their use of epithets because they can throw the reader out of a fic, but they have their place too! Consider this summary: “The Force-sensitive prodigy from the desert is male.” Is this true or false? Well, that depends on whether the phrase “the force-sensitive prodigy from the desert” is refering to Anakin Skywalker or Rey. If the author means Anakin, it’s true, but if they mean Rey, it’s false. Because the identity of “the force-sensitive prodigy from the desert” is unknown, we sometimes refer to it as “x,” so we don’t have to keep typing that every time. If you need more epithets, you can use “y,” “z,” or maybe “x’.”

Now what you’re really here for, _relationships!_ Given two characters, they can either be in a / pairing or not. Suppose in your Harry Potter fic Lupin and Snape are an item, and then so are Umbridge and Quirrell. So we’ll say /(SSQ, SSSSSQ) and /(SSSSQ, Q). Because we have the convention of writing / between members of a ship, you can get away with writing SSQ/SSSSSQ, as well as SSSSQ/Q when the context is clear.

However, as any Homestuck fan will tell you, there are more relationships than simply sexual and romantic attraction. (Actually I know nothing about Homestuck this is just by osmosis, sorry.) So if we let P represent Platonic attraction, we write P(Q,SQ) to say that Quirrell wants to be friends with Lockhart. (A lot of relationships are what we call “symmetric,” which means if Quirrell is friends with Lockhart, Lockhart should also be friends with Quirrell. But we don’t have to worry about that.)

We should also throw in something for the poly-shippers, so just do the same thing with more characters. sedo(Q,SQ,SSQ,SSSQ) would mean “Quirrell, Lockhart, Lupin, and Crouch Jr. are into sedoretu” or something. And same for one character at a time: w(SSSSSSQ) means “Amycus Currow is having a wank,” while not w(Q) means “Quirrell is not masturbating at the present time.” And so on.

As the above example shows, we also have access to words like “and,” “or,” “not,” “if/then,” “there is,” “for all,” which are good at padding word count. (Sometimes we can do with getting away with fewer. For instance, “There is a bounty hunter after me” means the same thing as “it’s not the case that all the bounty hunters are not after me,” but the last one is a little wordier.)

A lot of canons have kind of dumb plotlines that stem from characters not communicating to each other. Wheel of Time has some great parts, but it also gets bogged down in that “Rand heard that Egwene was going to tell Elayne that Mat should really talk to Perrin about Nynaeve’s cryptic message” and it’s like...if you string all these conversations forever, it could take all week. Fortunately, there’s a way to abbreviate this using sequences of natural numbers, so we can say something like “there are six people, including Nynaeve, tied up in this stupid message.” Not all canons have this property; those that do are called _wholesome_ and pure because they contain the whole numbers!

Anyway, using some more Gödel numbering silliness, you can exploit this to show that there are some scenes that are canon-compliant if, and only if, they can’t be ficced! If you were to write them down you’d recognize that they wouldn’t fit into canon, because some detail would contradict something else; however, as long as you haven’t written it down, it could be a plausible missing scene somewhere.

Obviously it’s hard to see what those fics would look like, but sometimes you can get summaries. For different canons, there will be different scenes—in some cases, a graphic sex scene between the two leads is a popular fic trope, but would never be made canon. In other canons, a summary of a “noodle incident” alluded to offscreen migth never make it into fic.

Some people misinterpret this “incompleteness” jargon to assume fic is broken forever, or that there are some stories that can never be written. It’s true that a lot of stories will probably never be produced even by a zillion monkeys pounding on typewriters, but then again, a lot of what monkeys produce isn’t all that good anyway. (See: Sturgeon’s Law.)

Gödel’s lesser-known result is the happier-sounding “Completeness Theorem,” which basically says that as long as you can crossover finitely many fandoms, you can crossover infinitely many. A corollary is the well-known Rule 34: “If it doesn’t contradict itself, it exists, and if it exists, there is porn of it.”

QED.


End file.
